 Hanover House, a residential tower block in Sheffield, with its cladding partially removed after failing fire safety tests following the Grenfell fire | |
| Date | June 14, 2017 – present |
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| Also known as | Cladding Scandal |
| Type | Crisis |
| Cause | Grenfell Tower fire |
| Outcome | Renovating cladding |
| Grenfell Tower, the fire, and its aftermath |
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The United Kingdom cladding crisis, also known as the cladding scandal, is an ongoing social crisis that followed the Grenfell Tower fire of 14 June 2017 and the Bolton Cube fire of 15 November 2019. The fires revealed that large numbers of buildings had been clad in dangerously combustible materials, comprising a combination of flammable cladding (the outer covering) and/or flammable insulation. (The term 'cladding' here refers to the external covering and the insulation behind it.)
Additionally, many buildings have been found to be non-compliant with other fire-safety building requirements, such as missing cavity barriers around windows and a lack of fire barriers, which are intended to prevent fires from spreading horizontally and vertically into neighbouring flats.
As well as these buildings posing an immediate fire risk to residents, flat owners find themselves facing extensive and costly remedial work, rocketing buildings insurance premiums, inability to sell their properties for more than 7 years, and the possibility of 'waking watches': paying people to patrol buildings 24/7 to check for fires.
Mortgage lenders, struggling to quantify the fire-risks posed by different buildings, have ceased to lend money for the purchase of many properties unless their owners can prove the building is safe, usually by way of an 'EWS1' form.
As of February 2021, the UK government had pledged over £5 billion towards remediation works, but extensive costs were still falling on the shoulders of individual leaseholders of flats who had unwittingly purchased unlawfully constructed homes.